This invention relates to high flux aromatic alkyl-substituted polyethersulfone membranes and methods for making and using these membranes.
In the past 30-35 years, the state of the art of polymer membrane-based gas separation processes has evolved rapidly. Membrane-based technologies have advantages of both low capital cost and high-energy efficiency compared to conventional separation methods. Membrane gas separation is of special interest to petroleum producers and refiners, chemical companies, and industrial gas suppliers. Several applications of membrane gas separation have achieved commercial success, including N2 enrichment from air, carbon dioxide removal from natural gas and from enhanced oil recovery, and also in hydrogen removal from nitrogen, methane, and argon in ammonia purge gas streams. For example, UOP's Separex™ cellulose acetate spiral wound polymeric membrane is currently an international market leader for carbon dioxide removal from natural gas.
Polymers provide a range of properties including low cost, permeability, mechanical stability, and ease of processability that are important for gas separation. Glassy polymers (i.e., polymers at temperatures below their Tg) have stiffer polymer backbones and therefore let smaller molecules such as hydrogen and helium pass through more quickly, while larger molecules such as hydrocarbons pass through more slowly as compared to polymers with less stiff backbones. Cellulose acetate (CA) glassy polymer membranes are used extensively in gas separation. Currently, such CA membranes are used for natural gas upgrading, including the removal of carbon dioxide. Although CA membranes have many advantages, they are limited in a number of properties including selectivity, permeability, and in chemical, thermal, and mechanical stability.
The membranes most commonly used in commercial gas and liquid separation applications are asymmetric polymeric membranes that have a thin nonporous selective skin layer that performs the separation. Separation is based on a solution-diffusion mechanism. This mechanism involves molecular-scale interactions of the permeating gas with the membrane polymer. The mechanism assumes that in a membrane having two opposing surfaces, each component is sorbed by the membrane at one surface, transported by a gas concentration gradient, and desorbed at the opposing surface. According to this solution-diffusion model, the membrane performance in separating a given pair of gases (e.g., CO2/CH4, O2/N2, H2/CH4) is determined by two parameters: the permeability coefficient (abbreviated hereinafter as permeability or PA) and the selectivity (αA/B). The PA is the product of the gas flux and the selective skin layer thickness of the membrane, divided by the pressure difference across the membrane. The αB is the ratio of the permeability coefficients of the two gases (αA/B=PA/PB) where PA is the permeability of the more permeable gas and PB is the permeability of the less permeable gas. Gases can have high permeability coefficients because of a high solubility coefficient, a high diffusion coefficient, or because both coefficients are high. In general, the diffusion coefficient decreases while the solubility coefficient increases with an increase in the molecular size of the gas. In high performance polymer membranes, both high permeability and selectivity are desirable because higher permeability decreases the size of the membrane area required to treat a given volume of gas, thereby decreasing capital cost of membrane units, and because higher selectivity results in a higher purity product gas.
One of the components to be separated by a membrane must have a sufficiently high permeance at the preferred conditions or extraordinarily large membrane surface areas is required to allow separation of large amounts of material. Permeance, measured in Gas Permeation Units (GPU, 1 GPU=10−6 cm3 (STP)/cm2 s (cm Hg)), is the pressure normalized flux and equals to permeability divided by the skin layer thickness of the membrane. Commercially available gas separation polymer membranes, such as CA, polyimide, and polysulfone membranes formed by phase inversion and solvent exchange methods have an asymmetric integrally skinned membrane structure. Such membranes are characterized by a thin, dense, selectively semipermeable surface “skin” and a less dense void-containing (or porous), non-selective support region, with pore sizes ranging from large in the support region to very small proximate to the “skin” However, fabrication of defect-free high selectivity asymmetric integrally skinned gas separation membranes is difficult. The presence of nanopores or defects in the skin layer reduces the membrane selectivity. Sometimes the high shrinkage of the polymer membrane on cloth substrate during membrane casting and drying process results in unsuccessful fabrication of asymmetric integrally skinned polymeric gas separation membranes using phase inversion technique.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,917,137 and U.S. Pat. No. 5,608,014 disclosed gas separation membranes prepared from blend of polyethersulfone with aromatic polyimides, polyamides, or polyamide-imides. The blending of polyethersulfone with aromatic polyimides can improve polyimide membrane properties such as processability, contaminant resistance, and selectivity. However, aromatic polyethersulfone is only miscible with very limited numbers of aromatic polyimides. The immiscibility of aromatic polyethersulfone with most of the aromatic polyimides makes the blend of polyethersulfone and aromatic polyimides difficult to be fabricated into gas separation membranes.
WO 2007/039538 discloses a process for preparing homoblock co-polysulfones and polysulfones prepared therefrom. The block copolysulfones comprise at least two types of homoblocks, wherein each of the homoblock has an identical or different molecular weight of at least 1000. WO 2007/039538 does not teach a gas separation membrane prepared from said homoblock co-polysulfones.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,393,323 discloses aromatic polyethersulfone gas separation membranes, wherein the aromatic polyethersulfones are formed from aromatic alcohols of the formula A
where Z is independently alkyl groups having 1 to 10 carbon atoms.
U.S. Pat. No. 8,796,399 discloses polyethersulfone compositions with high heat and good impact resistance, wherein the polyethersulfone consisting of formula B and formula C.

U.S. Pat. No. 8,796,399 does not disclose a gas separation membrane prepared from said polyethersulfone compositions.
The present invention discloses new high flux aromatic alkyl-substituted polyethersulfone membranes and methods for making and using these membranes for gas separations. The new high flux aromatic alkyl-substituted polyethersulfone membranes are made from aromatic alkyl-substituted polyethersulfone.